Risk and Opportunity: Italy in the Troubled Mediterranean during the 1970s

During the Seventies, in the stormy Mediterranean theatre, many events endangered NATO’s positions all along the Southern flank and threatened to jeopardize the stability in Europe and thus the Détente itself. In this scenario, Italy played a dual role. On the one hand it contributed to increasing the risks of instability with its own internal instability. During the so-called Years of Lead, Italy was affected by social turbulence, political terrorism, and violence, while at the same time going through economic decline and skyrocketing inflation. In the meantime, a sharp increase of votes for the Italian Communist Party (PCI) ignited fears that the PCI might be close to taking power, thus being able to further weaken the Atlantic Alliance by pushing Italy out of it. On the other hand, Italy was pivotal in serving the interests of the Alliance in the Mediterranean, avoiding an alteration of the military balance in Southern Europe by keeping Malta from shifting towards the Soviet Union. The Italian- Maltese agreement signed in August 1980 was the climax of this process. In addition to literature, this paper relies on documents, both edited (Foreign Relations of the United States) and unedited (held by The National Archives in London, the NARA II in Washington D.C., the Gerald Ford Presidential Library in Ann Arbor, the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library in Atlanta, the Archivio Centrale dello Stato in Rome, and the National Archives in Rabat, Malta)